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7.23.2014

I woke up this morning in an air conditioned condo after a deep, lengthy, restful and much needed sleep. Team Crazy Bird is in Clear Lake WI, a midway stop on today's route, but we got here yesterday because Nick on our team had access to his parents' condo in Clear Lake. The team decided to push through to the condo, rather than camp in the official overnight town of Forest City IA, where we would have been in tents and competing for showers and food. By riding the extra miles, we got the following benefits:

Air conditioning

Beds

Nice hot and private showers

Quiet

A pool

A hot tub

A motorboat

A homemade dinner (thanks Nick's mom!)

An egg breakfast with French press coffee

Today off from biking

We took a short cut from Crystal Lake, on yesterday's RAGBRAI route, to Clear Lake, rather than follow the longer official route.

The cost of this luxury is that we will have to catch up with RAGBRAI tomorrow but with this hiatus, we will be rested and recovered from the last three days of biking. Furthermore, we will take another shortcut to Mason City, tonight's overnight town, in the morning. It's on a bike path, which will be superb.

It looks like we may have lodging at a house on Thursday night as well, courtesy of another teammate's relatives and if the team decides not to ride on Saturday, usually the suckiest day of RAGBRAI, we might not have to camp out again. Instead we will probably head back to Jason's parents' house in Aplington IA and stay there. Or Sherry and I might go back to Madison depending on the car situation. That is, Jason's wife Janelle might ride with us on Friday and take my car from Aplington to Independence IA, where the ride starts on Friday. Then it would be a lot shorter distance to my car at the end of the day on Friday.